


Apocryphal Notes from a Time War: The Nightmare Child

by RobertSaysThis



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Jossed, Time War (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 08:25:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18465190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis
Summary: Before there was a canon version of the Nightmare Child, I wrote this as an explanation of what it was. It has been confirmed to be wrong: this version of the Child never existed. It does not still exist now. It will not come for you in your night sweats while you sleep, and no one will believe you if it does.





	Apocryphal Notes from a Time War: The Nightmare Child

To the Sisters of Karn, regeneration was not random. To the Time Lord that became known only as The Nightmare Child, this fact presented an intriguing possibility.

For the most part, in the early days of the Time War the Time Lords had not shown much interest in pushing the boundaries of what regeneration could entail. While this was to change later on as renegade fighters transformed themselves into weapons, planets or entire armies, while the Dalek threat remained minor few were willing to regenerate into anything much different from the ancestral form.

The Nightmare Child thought that this reluctance to push the limits of regeneration had no justification other than squeamishness, and increasingly felt it an indulgence her people could no longer afford. One of the first Time Lords to take the threat the Daleks posed seriously, she came to Karn with a proposition. She would describe the creatures of her darkest dreams, and the Planet’s Sisters would brew a potion that allowed her to become the worst thing her sleeping self had imagined. Then, reborn as a monster, she would have nightmares which were darker still- and the Sisters would in turn brew a potion for the creatures in them, and so on until all her regenerations were spent.

The final form of the Nightmare Child bore no resemblance to the young Time Lady who it had been twelve incarnations before: inded, it was awful enough that it cannot quite be described in words. Suffice to say that the creature was shunned, sent into exile until the Time Lords became desperate enough to have need of its service in the first great battle of the War. The success of the Child in that fight was to play a significant role in persuading the people of Gallifrey to pursue darker methods to conquer the Daleks- and may even have had a part in their greatest warrior’s decision to give up his ancient name.

Regardless of its influence, the Child was to have an ignoble end. When the Daleks created new weapons to assault its colossal form, the Time Lords granted the creature a new regenerative cycle in the hope it would once more be reborn as a loyal horror. The monster, however, was so traumatised by the War that it regenerated into an entire army of Daleks, each with eleven regenerations to spare. Even in their darkest imaginings, after all, the Daleks could not conceive of a creature more deadly than themselves: to do this would be to deny that the Dalek was the ultimate predator of the universe, and so to deny that it was Creation’s most superior being. It was thus a natural endpoint to any evolution in regenerative form: an insight that the Time Lords would subsequently wish the Daleks had never been granted.


End file.
